He is surprised that little was done about country houses in the 1940s. Had he been in England then, he would have noticed that the minds of government and owners were on other things. He might look at the names on war memorials in village churchyards – few landowning families were spared the deaths of men of military age.
In the 1950s, taste descended to a nadir and the author is right in saying that few English people wanted to live – and fewer wanted to work – in a big house. There has been a gradual change in attitude which has gained momentum in the last twenty years. Television programmes have sharpened people’s interest in works of art, and concern for conservation of the best buildings and their contents is driven by 2,300,000 members of the National Trust.
The author can hardly bear it when things begin to look up for some owners but, alas, many houses are still vulnerable and will inevitably come on the market to be sold, and almost immediately resold when the buyers discover they don’t fancy their new responsibilities and have bitten off more than they can chew.
Hoping for a word of encouragement in the summing up, I find French chateaux cited as an ‘instructive comparison’. Oh PLEASE. You can’t compare them. There are two basic differences between French and English attitudes to country houses. Frenchmen who have the choice would rather live in Paris than in the country, whereas the opposite holds here. The Code Napoléon has split up estates and emptied the chateaux of their contents, while primogeniture has been the saviour of what is left in this country – and a great deal is left.
The academic-eye view cites reasons for visiting houses as nostalgia and snobbism. Nowhere can I find the word ‘beauty’ to describe a house or garden, and I believe that to be the reason you and I enjoy seeing the wonders that are available to us. There are mistakes in facts and figures and little which is constructive but, living over the shop as it were, I read it with intense interest.
April 1997
Cold Houses
Anyone of my age is qualified to write about cold houses. Staying away in the 1930s for Pony Club dances before graduating to hunt balls taught me many a lesson in how to survive when the liberty bodice was overtaken by an off-the-shoulder evening dress.
Friends’ parents usually made a big effort to warm the house on the evening of the entertainment but for some strange reason no one feels cold in his own house, besides which they always started too late. Beatrice Lillie’s song, ‘Oh, For a Night in the Ballroom’ – ‘fires in the bedroom at four’ – said it all. The hostess, always an outdoor creature, was bound to be doing something with her dogs till the winter sun went down. The host was apt to be out hunting, so serious stoking didn’t start till they got in.
The best moment was a hot bath before dinner. In a big house you might have quite a trek to reach this haven of warmth and if someone else got there before you it was bad luck. You had to retrace your steps down the draughty passage and face the fact that the hot water may have run out. Twice I suffered the cruel-lest cut of all: hot water gushing beautifully from its tap and empty silence from the cold tap. Nothing for it but, undressed and shivering and making a fog of steam, to leg it back to the bedroom, disappointed and unwashed.
If the dance was in another house, there was the drive in the car to contend with. No one under fifty remembers cars before heaters. My mother’s car had wooden floorboards with big gaps between them so you could see the road rushing along under your feet. All the rugs in the world couldn’t keep you warm.
Back to bed in the strange house to find perfectly ironed sheets, which are at once the coldest and the most luxurious things going. You slid between the icy, shining linen only to gather up your feet into a place made warmer by the rest of you.
But all that was long ago and at Chatsworth things aren’t too bad. A new heating system was installed when we moved in and it works pretty well. Even so, the wind can penetrate huge old window frames which don’t fit exactly. In September we go round with rolls of sticky brown paper to stop the gaps. When the front door is open and people with luggage dawdle, all our part of the house feels the blast so we’ve cut a small door out of the big one and you have to enter at speed. There are zones of intense cold, seldom visited in winter: the Sculpture Gallery, State Rooms and attics, where a closed-season search for forgotten furniture can feel colder than being out of doors.
Nothing is so bad for pictures painted on board, furniture and leather bindings as central heating; even the modest temperature of the rooms we live in does some damage. Humidifiers have been recommended but they are so hideous that I don’t think I can bear to live with their sharp, white, metallic presence and horrible ceaseless noise. Anyway, they don’t work. Perhaps a kettle or two perpetually on the boil would do the trick and be homelier.
No one has suggested air conditioning. There I draw the line. I prefer hit-or-miss English heating to waking up with swollen feet and fingers about to burst, like cows’ udders at milking time, which happens after a night in an air-conditioned hotel. Or when in the tropics you need a fur coat to wear at dinner in an over-cooled restaurant.
After years of trial and error I’ve got my bedroom at Chatsworth about right, but there are the dogs to consider. When it was whippets, it seemed unkind to open the window at all. Then there was an old collie who would search for a cool spot, and for him the window had to be wide open. Labradors are accommodating as long as they aren’t in a draught, and one slept under the bed. The springs made a noise that went through my head whenever he turned over.
It is far less risky to stay away in the winter now. Things have changed since Andrew and I spent two unforgettably cold January nights in an official house in Northern Ireland some years ago. We were given an enormous room with a single-bar electric fire (which I drew life-size in a letter to a sister). And yet you were expected to wear a décolleté dress in the evening.
Standards now get ever higher and when people talk of ‘warm hospitality’ I reckon they mean hospitality is warmth.
January 1987
Recollections of Ditchley and Nancy Lancaster
I had a letter from Nancy suggesting I write what I remember of Ditchley. I said I would try. The next day came a postcard saying, ‘I don’t want a eulogy…’
After many years, does memory play you false? Do you look back on events, people and places in a slanted sort of way, slanted to summers being fine, friends always there, jokes, laughter, pleasure and entertainments galore, untouched by responsibility and living for the moment in a cheerful, hopeful sequence of exciting exploration? Perhaps you do, and perhaps it is lucky that adolescent discontent and the humdrum things which occupy most days are lost or are run together in a vague mist of recollection, and the special times remain, leapfrogging the rest. When I think of Ditchley all those years ago and the profound effect it had on me – and must have had on everyone who went there – it is impossible to write anything but a eulogy.
When I was a child we lived at Swinbrook, eleven or twelve miles away. I loved fox-hunting above all else and it was out hunting that I first saw Nancy. The meet of the Heythrop hounds was near our home, the unfashionable side of what was then an unfashionable hunt. The field consisted of people who lived in the Heythrop country, enlivened in term-time by wild undergraduates from Oxford riding unruly hirelings. Smart folk hunted in the shires. I can’t imagine what Nancy was doing at Ford Wells on a Saturday.
I was trotting along on my dock-tailed pony when a big chestnut horse came thundering by. It was ridden on a loose rein by an elegant woman on a side-saddle wearing the Heythrop green livery, faultless top hat and veil – the smartest thing imaginable. ‘Who is that?’ I asked our old groom. ‘Mrs Tree from Ditchley, on a blood ’orse.’ He didn’t have to tell me that. Later, when we passed the few horseboxes there were in those days, I saw her second horseman, a cockade in his top hat – something I had never seen before. I don’t know who made the greater impression, I only know that I have never forgotten them.
I first went to Ditchle
y when I was sixteen or seventeen, having got to know Nancy’s sons, Michael and Jeremy, out hunting. But I had seen the house before Nancy and her then husband Ronnie Tree bought it – empty and desolate, the park full of rabbits and sad white grass, at the time of the agricultural depression of the early 1930s. When Nancy and Ronnie arrived, it came to life and there they created perfection. On looking back, I realise that Ditchley taught me an invaluable lesson and that was to notice, to look, and try to absorb and remember what I saw that was beautiful. It was certainly the first time I became aware of such things. I suppose it was because of what Nancy gathered together under her roof, and the way she arranged the house. Whatever she touched had that hard-to-pin-down but instantly recognisable gift of style, arresting in its originality and satisfying to the spirit.
The house itself and its fixed decorations, together with much of the original furniture, was a wonderful start. But her genius (and that is no exaggeration) was her eye for colour, scale, objects and the dressing up of them, the stuffs the curtains are made of, their shapes and trimmings, the china, tablecloths, knives and forks; the things you see in all houses, but O the difference between Nancy’s way with household necessities and anyone else’s. Even the bathrooms were little works of art. Warm, panelled and carpeted, there were shelves of Chelsea china cauliflowers, cabbages, tulips and rabbits of exquisite quality. (A far cry from the cracked lino and icy draughts to which I was accustomed.) I had never seen such huge, square, down pillows as she went in for, nor the Porthault sheets decorated with carnations or trailing blue flowers of M. Porthault’s imagination, and scalloped edges of the same colour. Nor the puffed-up eiderdowns covered in pale silk with tiny bows where a stitch held the cover in place. The tea tables, which came and went at the proper time, had no cloths but were painted brilliant Chinese red. Easy enough, anyone could have done that – but no one else did.
The rooms and their delectable contents were only part of the story. All that beauty could have been set up and people would have delighted in it, but the whole of Ditchley reflected the personality, the aura if you like, of Nancy herself. She was the star on the stage she created.
I can see her now, sitting bolt upright at the end of the dining-room table on one of the high-backed yellow chairs with Ronnie’s initials embroidered on its cover, wearing something enviable with her own signature of a brilliant bit of colour somewhere, taking over the table so that people stopped to listen and laugh, making a comical mountain out of an ordinary molehill – a top-of-the-bill entertainer as well as a generous hostess.
The Trees were supported by a staff of servants no less talented at making their guests comfortable and happy than the hosts themselves. Mr Collins, the butler, was an extremely handsome man who was as polite to a seventeen-year-old girl as to a head of state. This invisible asset of perfect manners continued down to the housemaids, the kitchen staff, the grooms and the gamekeepers. These last were father and sons by the name of Starling, as neat and chirpy in their buttoned gaiters as the partridges they looked after. Cheerful Sunday morning visits to the chef and the stables were a pleasurable feature of staying at Ditchley.
In my mind’s eye there is Mr Collins, tall and splendid in his tailcoat, piling coal on the hall fire on a Monday morning when most people in his profession would thankfully leave such a task till the next invasion of weekend guests. But at Ditchley you were made to feel they actually regretted your going. Rare enough. I have known two other houses where you have that feeling – Houghton with Sybil Cholmondeley at the helm and my sister Diana’s Temple outside Paris.
Nancy and Ronnie were innovators in the garden, leaders of fashion outside as well as in. It was they who began the renaissance of old-fashioned roses, edging and designs in box, and so much else which has been copied ad infinitum in the last forty years and is so common now that you could be forgiven for forgetting who started it all.
After the war began and there was no petrol, I used to drive over from Swinbrook in a pony trap, fetching the pony out of the field and draping its second-hand harness over it to jog along the empty roads. On arrival the stud groom fetched it from the front door. Going home the next day the pony looked very different, shining all over, hooves dressed with oil and the harness and trap polished as never before.
When Winston Churchill used the house for weekends away from the bombing in London, I was delighted by Jeremy Tree’s yawns and sighs and evident longing to go to bed when the PM started – and went on – talking till the early hours. (My own children did just the same years later when Harold Macmillan came to Chatsworth and talked till the cows came home.) At Ditchley we would have preferred to listen to Nancy.
I have no doubt that, as in every other family, you only had to scratch the surface to find worries, dramas and sorrows not far away. But such was the atmosphere created by the Trees and the magic of the place that, as a young girl, I found unalloyed pleasure in my visits there.
How short a time this oasis of perfection lasted. I count myself very lucky to have seen it. In my life I have been to many beautiful places and met many fascinating people but I have never seen the like of Ditchley and Nancy. ‘I don’t want a eulogy…’ she said. Sorry, but how could it be otherwise?
Home to Roost
I lived in the friendly palace that is Chatsworth for more than half my long life and, at eighty-five, I was the oldest person by far in that unusual house, where one of the many luxuries was that you never had to look at anything ugly because you were surrounded by the best of everything from four centuries. Chatsworth is unusual because of its size, beauty, fame, contents, garden, surroundings and staff, and the fact that it is visited by about 600,000 people every year. Under its roof is a kind of university of knowledge. Art historians, educationalists, cooks, needlewomen, accountants, plumbers, electricians, lodge porters, joiners, security guards, cleaners, retailers, lecturers, night watchmen, firemen, a photographer, a silver steward, a computer man and archivists mingle, their roles sometimes blurred and melting into the next profession. They make up an organisation unmatched in this country. That is the house I have left.
My new house was once the vicarage for the parish of Edensor, surrounded by a park wall and a ha-ha wide enough to deter the most athletic deer from invading the garden. The house is old and curiously constructed, having been altered many times since the eighteenth century. It has been enlarged, made smaller and enlarged again. We found windows in what is now an internal wall, and a stone gatepost, with a hinge for hanging a gate, at the bottom of the stairs – apparently holding up the first floor. Another surprise awaits upstairs where the landing and one of the bedrooms has a stone floor seven inches thick and therefore extremely heavy. No explanation has been discovered for these oddities. In another bedroom the builders removed some plaster from an internal wall to find it lined with reeds, the flowers still attached to the ends of the stalks. They have put a glass panel so you can see this pretty and practical kind of insulation.
Bits of house stick out at angles. The dining room and the bedroom above have three outside walls, causing the last tenant to retreat to a bedroom over the Aga. For me it is an unheard-of pleasure for the kitchen to be just two steps away and for it to be two steps the other way into the garden. At Chatsworth both destinations meant an expedition. Time to cancel the glossies and order the Smallholder.
One luxury has backfired badly. My new film star’s bathroom has got a hand-held spray fed from the bath taps, something I have always wanted. Delighted, I tried it out. The beastly thing took control as if possessed of a devil and leapt about in my hand, soaking the much-too-pale film star’s carpet and all else in its path with scalding water. I won’t try that again.
Forty-six years and a month is not so long to stay in a house in these parts. There are a few ancients around who still live in the house where they were born. Nevertheless, nearly half a century produces a staggering accumulation of what my daughter calls ‘glut’ and decisions as to what to take from the quar
t jug to fit into the pint pot filled my waking hours and sometimes woke me when most people were sleeping.
A few precious things are lost in a move but many are found. Lurking unseen for years in a bookshelf was a Roxburghe Club volume, whose title I won’t mention for fear of offending the donor. Given to Andrew by that elite company of bookworms, it was sitting there between Fowls and How to Keep Them and a slim volume to delight the heart of any teenage boy entitled Studies in the Art of Ratcatching: A Manual for Schools, published by John Murray, no less, in 1891. I must ask the present bearer of that distinguished name if it was a best-seller.
At Chatsworth, clothes were hung far into a cupboard the size of an ordinary room in any normal house. Some French numbers of the 1950s and 1960s still hold their own in any company: quality incomparable; style timeless. One of the unwanted bedrooms in the Old Vicarage has become home for these beautiful garments. A granddaughter looked as if she had been poured into the simplest, best-cut, pitch-black evening dress – long sleeves, long skirt, no fuss, no decoration, made of some magic material between satin and thick silk. A dress to wear and to keep for her daughter now aged fifteen.
Trickier than pictures and clothes when it comes to a new home are ornaments: bits of china, stopped watches, presents from six-year-old grandchildren made with deepest concentration, hideous and easily broken but well remembered by the manufacturer and important for them to find still there. The boxes used by publishers sending books for our shops are invaluable at this point.
For weeks I felt like Edith Somerville, the Irish writer, who, aged eighty-eight, left her home of sixty years for a smaller house. In despair, she wailed to a nephew, ‘Under everything there is something.’ I pity people who have to move to the north of Scotland or Cornwall or, worse still, abroad. Being only a few hundred yards away, I can at least – like the Swiss Family Robinson – ‘go back to the wreck’ for a vital hammer or a pearl necklace left behind.
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